Eli5 The scale of 18 quintillion

Question

I recently got into no man’s sky and heard the estimated number of planets (as above) I was floored but felt it’s larger than I’m grasping it and even larger than the way I explain it to others.

I recall from a tiktok or something that if everyone in the world played the game and found a planet 24/7, 365.2425 days, it would take approx 15000 years to find every single planet

Edit: these analogies are super helpful, thank you so much!

Is my time scale accurate also?

In: 25

Answer 1

Imagine that every grain of sand on Earth is a planet. The current estimate for grains of sand is 7.5 quintillion. There are 2.4x as many planets in NMS than grains of sand on our planet.